LITERATURE: Joyce’s Portrait – Philosophy

I’ll be swimming in this pool of thought for a while; Stephen on beauty:

The tragic emotion, in fact, is a face looking two ways, towards terror and towards pity, both of which are phases of it.(…)  The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire, or loathing.  Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to aboandon, to go from something.  These are kinetic emotions.  The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts.  The esthetic emotion is therefore static.  The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing. (p. 205)

Beauty expressed by the artist cannot awaken in us an emotion which is kinetic or a sensation which is purely physical.  It awakens, or ought to awaken, or induces, or ought to induce, an esthetic stasis, an ideal pity or an ideal terror, a statis called forth, prolonged and at last dissolved by what I call the rhythm of beauty.  (p. 206)

I’ll be back when I get a grip.